Bio Apps Reflection 5

How have views of writing questions changed?

In inquiry based classrooms, questioning is the driving factor that leads to the construction of meaning. Students have the freedom to explore whatever questions they may have on a topic as it is the teacher's role to direct their learning through series of questions rather than lectures. I have been working with the concept of questioning in science education for the past few semesters and still feel as if I have so much more to learn. I understand that questioning is essential but still need work on creating the most appropriate questions to foster the gaining of knowledge. It was helpful to dissect questions we originally created and decide what parts were good to keep and which ones needed tweaking. I think that if we are to promote getting hands on with concepts in science education, that we as teachers in training need to role play and actually go forth in doing these tasks.
 I find that it is somewhat challenging to create questions that do not directly ask "what am I thinking in my head?" but give enough background for students to build off of. I still believe that questioning should be the very first thing done by the teacher in a lesson to probe for prior knowledge which could also be misconceptions. Something that I vere off from but was reminded in class last week, was to make every question asked match the big idea. Of course every question asked is going to have a purpose but it is easy to stray away from the big idea when trying to get specific.
A prominant change or reinforcement that I've acquired is that it is extremely important to create questions before hand but leave a lot of room for flexibility knowing that students have minds of their own and will change up the situation in a split of a second. This then relates to making questions something that I would want to/be able to answer. When questioing students, we want to propose questions that engage students in exploring the big idea, creating evidence for their responses and the option to evaluate their own findings as well as their peers. This will get the students to construct knowledge on a deeper level rather than simply recognition and recall.
As the wise Albert Einstein once said, "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."